Akoy Agau: Lost and Found

Sports journalism at the high school and community level often is about more than the sport.  I was reminded of this in reporting a story about Akoy Agau, star center for Omaha Central High School, who fled his native Sudan as a little boy.

Akoy Agau

The story was supposed to be about how students of Agau’s era understood the 1960s, as depicted in my book, “The Rhythm Boys of Omaha Central: High School Basketball at the ’68 Racial Divide”.

But my reporting took me in a different direction, toward Central’s “persistently lowest-achieving” status under state and federal No Child Left Behind standards, and the tangle of politics behind it.

Here’s the story for the Oxford African-American Studies Center.